How to mass hide/unhide BIRT controls

[raviprsd18]

Hello BIRT team,

I have many report design files that contains lot of controls inside each report design.
Following is my problem statement.

1. When ever any validation or any exception occurs in the report execution, I need to show a friend message to the users inside the report. ( Reason for the exception is logged for future troubleshooting )
2. I need a better way to hide all the controls in the report design and show only error message the user ( attached the sample )
   

I don't want to put all my controls inside a grid and hide/show that grid because this resulting in some formatting issue when I export to .XLSX file type.

Any idea on achieving this ?

Thanks in advance.

[speckyspooky]

Can you give an example what you mean with controls in report currently I have no idea
what your use case is and about which controls we are speak.

If you would hae a very small test example whith your topic would be help to see the problem detailed.

[raviprsd18]

Hello @speckyspooky thanks for the reply.

Here I am attaching a sample report that contains label, text, image, table BIRT controls ( all are dummy controls, just for explanation purpose ), here controls means BIRT controls like label, dynamic text, image etc.
I have also added a grid control whose name ErrorMessageTemplate.

I need help in showing only ErrorMessageTemplate grid when ever exception happens in the report by hiding all the other controls. In the similar lines if there are no exceptions happens during report execution, I need to hide the ErrorMessageTemplate grid and show rest of the BIRT controls used in report design.
Example_MassHide_Unhide.zip

[raviprsd18]

Hello @speckyspooky,
Thanks for the reply.

I was looking for this kind of solution. Last request, in the code I can see all the elements names are stored in the array then based on the reportParameter success / failure controls are dropped.

Do BIRT have any API or inbuilt function that give all the controls reference present in the reportDesign ? So that I can eliminate the logic of storing the control names in array and then dropping it. If this is possible then in future if any new controls are added or deleted no need to update the array, as a result easy to maintain the code.

[hvbtup]

That is the DE API.
You can inspect and modify a report design file from within Javascript in the beforeFactory event, IIRC.
But honestly, I think the way you are approaching this topic is wrong.
Usually it should be much easier to e.g. check your parameter values in the beforeOpen event of the outermost (regarding the bindings) dataset and just "not find" any top-level data if the parameters are invalid, e.g. by setting the dataset parameters to a combination that cannot find anything.

[hvbtup]

You can also fill an array variable (let's call it errorMessages) along the way, and add a scripted dataset (which can be very generic, e.g. referenced from a library) to the end of the report which shows these error messages.

[speckyspooky]

Yes, you can get the IDs instead of a static array based on the design handle.
Here a small example for the beforeFactory-method:

var body = reportContext.getDesignHandle().getBody();
var it = body.iterator();

glElemOverview = "";
while (it.hasNext()) {
       var obj = it.next();
       glElemOverview += "<br>" + obj.getName();
}

[raviprsd18]

@speckyspooky thanks for the solution, I got exactly what I need. As always you saved me :)